“when we lost something precious, and we’d looked and looked and still couldn’t find it, then we didn’t have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel around the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.”

She told Roy that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul.”

But I didn’t say or do anything. It was partly, I suppose, that I was so floored by the fact that Ruth would come out with such a trick. I remember a huge tiredness coming over me, a kind of lethargy in the face of the tangled mess before me. It was like being given a maths problem when your brain’s exhausted, and you know there’s some far-off

What made the tape so special for me was this one particular song: track number three, “Never Let Me Go.”

just so long as they aren’t psychos.

quizzed him a lot on this point and I suspect the truth was that it was like a lot of things at that age: you don’t have any clear reason, you just do it. You do it because you think it might get a laugh, or because you want to see if it’ll cause a stir. And when you’re asked to explain it afterwards, it doesn’t seem to make any sense.

that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you—of how you were brought into this world and why—and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment.

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.”

Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and—no matter how much we despised ourselves for it—unable quite to let each other go.